In recent years, along with the spread of personal computers in ordinary homes, digital cameras that are capable of inputting image information, such as photographed landscapes and portraits, to a personal computer are also widely spreading. Further, recent digital cameras are more and more sophisticated, and there are demands for a digital camera equipped with a zoom lens that allows successful wide-angle imaging.
In order to meet such demands, a zoom lens, such as zoom lenses disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication Nos. 2003-107348 and 2009-156905 (hereinafter, Patent Documents 1 and 2), for example, which consists of, in order from the object side, a first lens group having a negative refractive power, a second lens group having a positive refractive power and a third lens group having a positive refractive power, where magnification change is achieved by changing an interval between the groups, is used. Further, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2011-081185 (hereinafter, Patent Document 3) discloses a zoom lens that has a similar basic configuration to those of Patent Documents 1 and 2 and has a small F-number at the wide-angle end.